Went out for a short walk along a creek trail not far from home on Saturday (October 17). It's the autumn migration season for songbirds, so this is a good time of year to see warblers moving south for the winter and sometimes to see exotic strays not normally present in our area. Didn't see anything exotic and only one warbler species (a pretty Townsend's Warbler), but I did see a busy Pileated Woodpecker working on making a hole in a tree branch. North America's largest woodpecker species (Dryocopus pileatus).

Wines I'm Making: 2020 Cabernet Pressing

It's that time of year again. On Saturday I pressed the new 2020 wine (October 17). We got about 150lbs of Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc grapes from our little backyard vineyard (25 Cabernet vines, of which four, or 16%, are Cabernet Franc) this year. I fermented the grapes this year using Rockpile yeast after a two-day pre-soak. As we harvested and crushed the grapes on October 3, fermentation took twelve days. We ended up with 11.4 gallons of pressed wine (and last week four gallons of rosé from our nine Sangiovese vines).

Next step is to inoculate the new wine with malolactic bacteria to induce malolactic fermentation, which converts some of the malic acid in the grapes to lactic acid, which softens it--standard procedure with red wines. This wine will be ready to bottle in about a year. The 2019 wine is ready to be bottled now--the next wine-related task that awaits me.